Renigunta (Andhra Pradesh), Mar 18 (IANS): The South Central Railway (SCR) zone's Renigunta railway station has crossed the milestone of shipping 7 crore litres of milk to New Delhi in the past one year.

"Doodh Duronto specials have transported 7 crore litres of milk to the national capital, New Delhi in the current financial year 2020 - 21 till March 16, which is the highest ever transportation since its commencement," said a railway zone official.

Incidentally, Renigunta started shipping milk in the year 2011 - 12 and used to just link a few milk tankers to regular superfast trains.

From that year onwards, milk is being shipped on a regular basis, amounting to about 2 - 3 crore litres every financial year.

"There has been an increase in demand as the years passed by and in the year 2019 - 20, 4.4 crore litres were transported. But in the month of April 2020, due to Covid lockdown, when all passenger trains came to a halt, milk transportation was a challenging task to the zone," he said.

Consequently, the railway zone's general manager Gajanam Mallya directed officials to run exclusive milk trains named 'doodh duronto'.

Starting March 26, 2020 special trains have been run on alternate days and seeing the high demand, the railway zone started running daily 'doodh duronto' from July 15, 2020, which is continuing even now.

"Considering the importance of 'doodh duronto' specials, SCR has been operating 'doodh duronto' specials on par with mail express trains and the distance between Renigunta and Hazrat Nizamuddin (2,300 km) is being covered within a short time of 30 hours," said the official.

These milk trains chug with six tankers, with each tanker having a capacity of 40,000 litres and totalling up to 2.4 lakh litres per train.

Until now, 296 milk trips have been made, operating 1,753 tankers leading up to the shipping of 7 crore litres of milk in the current fiscal.